


By Righteousness Alone

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Attolian mythology, Bullying, Classism, Costis can't keep his mouth shut, Gen, Meet-Cute, Patronoi being jerks, Pre-Canon, Prison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2018-07-14 11:03:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7168436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which an attempt to do the right thing earns Costis a night in jail and a lifelong friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Righteousness Alone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bookwyrm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookwyrm/gifts).



Costis sat in the dark and wondered if any of his friends would have a scrap of copper tucked away that he might borrow in order to send a letter home.

He hoped not. Having ample time to revisit the events of the evening he had concluded that all of them had acted with honor, all of them were still men he was proud to call his friends, and so he hoped fervently that they were all as piously destitute as he was.

Perhaps someone might lend him a bit of paper. Priam had mentioned that he wrote home to his family, but Priam had not been at the wineshop this evening. He’d gone to his bed, as Costis now dearly wished he had done, so he hadn’t seen what happened and might not be inclined to do a favor for a disgraced fellow trainee.

Costis’s only comfort lay with the fact that he hadn’t been dragged directly to the public jail, or even into one of the holding cells beneath the barracks. Instead he’d been locked in one of two bare storerooms adjoining the office of the Captain of the Queen’s Guard. The men who’d brought him in had taken his belt, his cloak, and his cloak pin. They hadn’t bothered to relieve him of his empty purse.

The pile of coins he’d left on the altar that afternoon had looked so small, but to Costis it was everything. Truly everything. He knew that when a rich man pledged himself to the service of Miras it was an accepted tradition that he get around the directive that ‘the adherent must dedicate all the coins in his purse and live for a time by righteousness alone’ by keeping all but his daily coin in a counting house or banked safely with relatives, so that he might empty his pockets upon the altar without ruining his family. For Costis and his friends, though, who all had so very little, holding back nothing and resolving to eat and drink only by the generosity of Her Majesty had felt less like a sacrifice, and more like a great leap through a doorway after loitering outside for too long.

And so Costis hoped that none of his friends had held back even a single dram from their dedication, dearly though Costis could have used it.

On the other hand, if he was dismissed from the guard, he wouldn’t need to pay to send a letter. He would end up explaining himself in person when he showed up on his father’s doorstep mere months after leaving it. And he had only just begun to find pleasure in his days again, too, his aching homesickness finally abating.

“I’m sorry.” There was a cough and a shuffling of feet, and Costis found he had to clear his own throat twice to reply.

“For what?”

An incredulous snort was not muffled by the knotted wood planks that separated them. “That you’ve been burdened with an overlarge sense of duty, what else? You should be snoring drunkenly in your own bed right now.”

Costis glared into the darkness around him. “As should you.”

He heard a rustle from the neighboring storeroom and wondered what would have happened if they’d taken in more of the guards and trainees from the wineshop. Would they have caged them all here in two groups, keeping the patronoi and the okloi separate? 

“No. I’m right where I deserve to be,” the other man said, not sounding terribly convinced of his assertion of just desserts. “I was going to hit him.”

“But you didn’t,” Costis said. 

The watchmen had arrived in the wineshop just as the okloi soldier surged forward, ready to fly in the face of the patronoi who’d knocked his friend down.

“No, I didn’t, because I was stopped. But I would have. You really think the distinction matters?”

Costis thought about this, but found his mind wandering. In the hours since the doors had swung to and the locks grated, full dark had fallen and the hush of the sleeping city lay thick around them. The silence had seemed oppressive to him, he was sure, mere moments ago. Now, though, in the absence of their voices, Costis became aware of a hundred nighttime noises within and without. A dog bayed in the distance and a hollow thump sounded from the other side of the wall. Costis also let his head fall back against it. He was exhausted.

“I think, in this case,” Costis said finally, “that yes, the distinction matters. You _didn’t_ hit him but here you are and where is the man who hit your friend? Walking free while you take the punishment for something you didn’t do.”

“And for what great sin are you atoning, then?” The man’s voice was as dry as the cheap wine the older Miras adherents had bought for Costis and his friends.

“For botching my attempt to do the right thing, I suppose,” Costis muttered, more to himself than anything.

It didn’t seem possible that all of this had happened in a single day. That the ceremony confirming him as a member of the Miras cult had ended only a few hours ago. Afterwards, Costis and his friends had walked through the city, enjoying the warmth of the evening and the freedom of their first day off in months. Near supper time they’d turned up the street that would take them directly back to the barracks, complaining good-naturedly that they could not join in the merry-making crowds that spilled from the doorsteps of the wineshops, devout beggars as they were now. 

Until an older man, a lieutenant in the Queen’s Guard, spotted them and their shiny new copper rings and called them into a shop, determined that they should all join him in a cup at his own expense.

The man and his friends were all soldiers and the fingers on their left hands were tinged green around the edges of their rings, just as Costis’s would grow to be. Priam and another had made their polite excuses and left, just a bit too quickly for Costis to make up his mind to join them. It made him uneasy, joining these boisterous men when a moment before he’d been contemplating his upcoming asceticism with something very like contentment, but they all wore the seal ring of Miras and truth be told it had been so long since Costis tasted wine that when a cup was passed to him, he toasted it with a smile and drank deep.

He was not attending to the conversation around him until fists were clenched and voices raised in filthy accusations that flew across the narrow space. His hackles rising, Costis had reached for his empty sword belt. His hand closed on air just as he noticed the copper rings on the strangers who stood their ground against the soldiers who had bought wine for Costis and his friends. The soldiers were bullying the best seats in the shop from the okloi who were already there, and growing enraged when they were not meekly obeyed. 

A short bark of a laugh came from the other side of the wall, and Costis was startled out of reliving the rest of the scene for what was probably the fiftieth time since it happened. 

“You just joined up today, then?” the other man, the okloi soldier and Costis’s fellow inmate, asked. “Paid your dues and got your ring?”

“Yes,” Costis answered. “It was our first free day since we began sword training.”

“I remember that day.” Costis wondered if he was twisting the ring on his own finger as he spoke; it was a habit Costis had observed of nearly all Miras men. 

“How long ago for you?”

“Two years. I am newly a member of Her Majesty’s guard, and a glorious day it was. I shall tell my grandchildren the story of my single day of service. Cold comfort, I admit, but it’s something, to know that I will at least be good for making my family laugh when I’m old and blind.”

Costis, at a loss, asked, “Why will you be blind?”

A short silence. “My father is a tanner. I should have been, too.”

“Oh.” Costis thought of his own home, the farm where he could have grown old. There, at least, the greatest danger lay in being stupid around a nervous horse and risking a foot. And, more recently, in the unshakeable odor that followed him to the city where he learned that it didn’t matter that you were patronoi if you smelled like shit. He had joined Her Majesty’s army as a matter of duty, not to escape the certain slow poison of tannery fumes.

“Is that usual?” Costis asked, an indeterminate length of time later. “Tonight, I mean. Does it happen often?” 

There was a slow rustling on the other side of the wall, and Costis wondered if the other man had fallen asleep. “Often enough,” he answered at last.

“That it happens at all is too often,” Costis said, anger rising in his blood again.

The watchmen had stepped into the fray and ended the altercation. Costis had been ready to slip away and swear that he’d spent the evening somewhere, anywhere else, except that he couldn’t pretend not to see one of the guards take a rough grip on the shoulder of the okloi soldier who’d tried to defend his friend and shake him, naming him as the instigator. 

And that’s when all the blocks between Costis’s brain and his tongue had sprung a leak and then burst. He’d felt like he was watching the scene from somewhere over his own left shoulder, reminding him uncannily of the day years ago that he and his sister hid in the cow barn to listen to their father and uncle argue about a dam. 

“I can’t believe you talked them into locking you up for no reason.” Costis wasn’t sure, fear and anger and regret and indignation were pounding loud in his ears, but he thought the other man might have been laughing again. 

“I didn’t--” Costis cut himself short. Yes, he was definitely being laughed at. Costis knew very little of the stranger for whose sake he’d put his position in the guard and all his dreams for the future on the line, but he wondered if the man faced all his problems with an insolent grin on his face, or if his laughter was reserved for only the truly hopeless occasions.

“They were looking for someone to blame,” Costis said, grasping for a reasonable tone of voice. “I didn’t talk them into locking me up.”

“Oh yes, right, you only said, ‘if you’re taking him away you’ll have to take me too for I’m just as guilty as he is!’”

“Which was to say not at all!” Costis replied, mortified. Surely they could not have misunderstood?

“Oh, Brother, you are a long way from home.” He was laughing again. “Pomea?”

“The Gede Valley,” Costis answered automatically, distracted by the way he’d been called _Brother_. That had been Costis’s own thought, his very thought, back in the wineshop in that moment when he reached for the sword that wasn’t there, ready to defend his friends only to find himself facing other men wearing the livery of the Queen; other men wearing the copper rings of Miras. 

_But we are their brothers,_ he’d wanted to say, when the older men began calling out okloi slurs that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

“Your people are farmers?”

“Yes. For many generations.” Costis squinted in the dark, wondering what that had to do with anything, but glad for the distraction of talking about something else. 

There came a sound of heavy boots from down the corridor and then the cell door swung open. Costis flinched back with a yelp, tears springing to his eyes in the sudden bright torchlight. And then he was springing to his feet to salute his captain.

“I should have known,” Teleus said, shaking his head.

“Sir?” Costis blinked, the light still stabbing ruthlessly through his eyes and into his brain, making it impossible to think.

“When Lieutenant Antero told me that one of my patronoi trainees had refused his own parole out of solidarity for a wrongfully accused okloi guardsman…I should have known that trainee would be you, Costis.”

Costis looked at his feet, trying at the same time to clear his streaming eyes and parse the strange sense of pride the captain’s words brought to his chest. He had little success with either endeavor.

“Sir,” Costis said, feeling blurred but bold enough to meet Teleus’s eye. “Sir, please allow me to explain what happened, and to tell you that…”

“I have been told already what happened, Costis,” the captain said as Costis stumbled over his words. He’d realized only after he began speaking that although he had been locked up because of him, he did not know the other man’s name.

“I would be grateful if you would allow me to tell you again, sir, in hopes that you will believe me when I tell you that my friend is innocent of any wrongdoing in this--”

“Costis,” Teleus interrupted him again, more drily this time. “Costis, I have looked into the matter and it has been resolved. I have heard the accounts of the others who were present and I have the bodily testimony of an innocent man who chose to spend a night in jail to make a point. This is not the first time a complaint has been brought against this particular soldier and it has become clear that discipline, if not dismissal, is in order.”

Costis gaped at the captain in something close to despair. An hour ago he’d thought he was facing dismissal from the Queen’s service; he hadn’t meant to bring down that fate on someone else’s head.

“Costis,” Teleus said, and although his voice was quiet it was still as gruff as Costis had ever heard it on the parade ground. “If the Guard is to succeed, if the Queen is to survive, we can have no place among us for men who see arbitrary difference between themselves and their brothers in arms. You took a risk in good faith, tonight, for a man you’d never met but who was not a stranger because you understand what I’m talking about, Costis. You understand the value of brotherhood and loyalty in these times.”

Costis had the feeling that, if anyone had reached out and touched him, he’d have burst like an overripe tomato. Praying that the harsh torchlight would somehow cast him into shadow rather than illuminate his burning cheeks, he stuttered something incoherent, knowing only that it contained thanks and apologies and repetitions of Teleus’s own words. Loyalty and brotherhood.

“I grew up in a family of nine brothers.” Costis and Teleus both turned to look at the other man, who stood a little ways apart with his arms crossed over his chest. “And I have to say that being called names and kicked out of my seat isn’t quite enough to get me up in arms. Not personally.” 

Costis felt the captain swell to his full height beside him, drawing breath for rebuke, but the man wasn’t finished. He turned to Costis and smiled. The insolent grin of Costis’s imagination could not have been farther from the reality of the sweet, almost shy smile bestowed on him. 

“It means more to me than wax candles on the altar that you were so moved to act on my behalf. I thank you.”

Teleus exhaled noisily, and they both turned to look at him. “It’s nearing the end of dog watch and if I’m not mistaken one of you will soon be on duty and the other,” the captain turned to Costis, “has training at dawn.”

As the captain turned to leave neither of them could hold back a groan at the thought of standing up straight much less holding a sword steady after such a night. Teleus did not stop but called back over his shoulder, “There will be war in our time, men. I expect you to meet it head on.”

Costis fell into step beside his fellow ex-inmate, both of them rolling sore shoulders and stamping numb feet. “Well,” the other man said once Teleus was safely out of earshot, “he’s got a cheerful outlook and no mistake.”

Costis had to stop and clutch at a doorframe to keep himself upright, unable to check the sudden, manic laughter that burst from him. Shaking his head, trying to indicate his apology when he could scarcely draw breath into his lungs, he had nearly got himself back under control when he was set off again by crinkled eyes and a bracing arm across his shoulders.

When the fit had passed over both of them and they were standing straight in the pearlescent light of pre-dawn, his new friend turned to him and they clasped hands.

“I’m Aris, by the way,” he said. “Aristogiton. Miraculously still of the Eighth Century.”

“Costis,” Costis said. “Costis Ormentiedes.”

“Glad to know you, Costis Ormentiedes. Now come on,” Aris clapped him on the shoulder and nudged him in the direction of the kitchens. “What do you say we go find some coffee and get this beast of a day started?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks are in order!
> 
> I have been blessed in this life with a sister who first gives me the best books to read and then gives me the best advice when I try to write stories about the stories. 
> 
> Thanks to my friend stardust_made for reading this and encouraging me always.
> 
> Cheers to bookwyrm for the awesome prompts, I couldn't believe my luck when I got my assignment and I hope you enjoy this story!
> 
> And much gratitude to the lovely moderator who made this exchange happen, it's been a delight.


End file.
